Amy Macdonald Displays ‘Unusual Ability’ With Regard to Boy Toys at Show

Earlier this month in London.Photo: Getty Images

If you didn’t know how to define Amy Macdonald before her show last night at the Living Room, the Scottish singer-songwriter — whose album, forthcoming here, has gone platinum pretty much everywhere else — offered a convenient shorthand. “What did they call us?” Macdonald asked her litter of floppy boy musicians, referring to the phrase Immigration inscribed on the band’s visas. “Oh yes: aliens with an unusual ability.” Less succinctly put, Macdonald is a sort of country version of Alanis Morissette. At the show she played a fierce acoustic guitar, sang in an admirably throaty voice, and projected a happy, intense presence, but her unusual ability might have turned out to be the knack for gathering a stage full of handsome, brunet lads. Even her guitar tech bore a passing resemblance to Jake Gyllenhaal — the man that Macdonald once declared “the most beautiful thing that’s ever been created.” Was she pandering to Americans? Last night she hardly seemed the type. —Emma Pearse